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Cosmic searches at the South Pole. The BICEP-2 Telescope is the up-facing dish at right. The larger white dish is the South Pole Telescope (SPT), and the building is the Dark Sector Laboratory. Both experiments observe in the millimeter-submillimeter part of the spectrum, mapping polarization patterns in the cosmic background radiation.
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…… will announce a “major discovery” about B-modes in the cosmic microwave background See: Who should get the Nobel Prize for cosmic inflation?
UPDATE:
The BICEP result, if correct, is a spectacular and historic discovery. In terms of impact on fundamental physics, particularly as a tool for testing ideas about quantum gravity, the detection of primordial gravitational waves is completely unprecedented. Inflation evidently occurred just two orders of magnitude below the Planck scale, and we have now seen the quantum fluctuations of the graviton. For those who want to understand how the universe began, and also for those who want to understand quantum gravity, it just doesn’t get any better than this.
In fact, it all seems far too good to be true. And perhaps it is: check back after another experimental team is able to check the BICEP findings, and then we can really break out the champagne.
This should be really interesting.
Stanford Professor Andrei Linde celebrates physics breakthrough
See Also:
Dialogos of Eide 